Fonts and Planning with Emacs 23

Lately I’ve become enamoured with Emacs planner-mode which allows me to use Emacs to maintain task lists and schedule information in a psuedo-wiki-like environment (courtesy of Emacs Muse ). In particular I’ve been using the planner-timeclock to track what projects get my attention and when. Of course its not 100% accurate — I still often forget to “clock in” when starting to work on something — but I think I’ll be able to get some useful information from it.

This weekend, however, I managed to screw up the fonts in Emacs. They were never great, but I’d managed to get them to a state where they didn’t kill my eyes or take up half the screen. As I started to poke at the problem this morning, I ran across the prospect of using Emacs with XFT fonts. More poking and I found a source for .debs of updated <span class="pre">emacs-snapshot packages. Your mileage may vary, but I found, like other people in the comments thread, that the dapper packages actually work better on Edgy than the edgy ones. So after installing the packages I had lovely anti-aliased font support, but alas, planner-mode broke. So to save anyone else in this situation (ha!) some grief, you need to grab planner and muse from source when using them with Emacs 23 on Ubuntu 6.10. The “latest” tarball links in the Emacs Wiki work.